The cry rings out; the rejoicing
commences. There is an old Chinese proverb, brought back to Venice by Marco
Polo: “That which does not go forwards finds the right path by going
backwards.” Last year we feared the Venice Film Festival was headed for Hades
in a handcart: the portal to Hell represented by that giant hole in the
ground created by the plan for a new festival palace, a project dramatically
aborted by the discovery of a cache of asbestos. Now, failed by
forward-looking architectural ambition, the event turns round and heads the
other way. Back to the future. Empowered by the past.

We have a new/old festival director in
Alberto Barbera, who previously pontiffed
the event between 1999 and 2001. We have a new/old festival palazzo, the
Mussolini-era mansion buffed up with a fresh frontage and giant red
sculptural frou-frous inspired by Jaeger LeCoutre. We had a bunch of restored classics to afford
us timeless entertainment, from HEAVEN’S GATE (squired by Michael Cimino himself) to SUNSET BOULEVARD. On the first day
there was even a banner-carrying rally, noisy and spectacular, as 100 folk
dressed in colours of the Italian flag marched through the Lido demanding a
reprieve for the oldest, most historic, most Italian film studio in Europe,
the endangered Cinecitta.

Out with the new, back with the old.
Across the lagoon a freshly restored Ducal Palace reaffirms the theme. Let
sleeping doges lie? Never. Venice loves history and
demands its reanimation.

Barbera even cut the number of films. Ex-chief Marco Muller, now gone to
the Rome festival, had overstuffed the fest, Barbera
contended, making the Venice gig start to look (shock horror) like the Cannes
gig. And the pressures of politics and money in these austere Eurozone
times…. Well, we got the idea.

We didn’t complain either. The first masterpiece
arrived on day two. Paul Thomas Anderson’s THE MASTER, magisterial as its
title, is two and a quarter hours of radical cheek resonant with metaphor,
satire and playful metaphysics. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Anderson’s signature
star (discovered in BOOGIE NIGHTS), plays the cult leader who adopts
traumatised World War 2 sailor Joaquin Phoenix as his henchman and favourite,
in a conflict-battered world hungry for certitude. (Compare, as I’m sure
Anderson is, America in the lingering aftershock of 9/11).

It is very cheeky, and more radical than
it should be in a world pretending to free speech, to satirise a modern cult
that has aggressively used lawyers to keep its opponents mute and its
defectors mum. THE MASTER no more names its quarry than CITIZEN KANE named
William Randolph Hearst – but we can guess the likely target(s). In form the
film is a set of brilliant variations on a theme of tortured bromance. Hoffman/Phoenix duologues unspool in which
brotherly minds are opened up like giant wounds, to titrate cures that are
worse than the pain, and in which Anderson demonstrates his ear for
impudently resonant dialogue. Hoffman and Phoenix (in the film ‘Lancaster
Dodd’ and ‘Freddie Quell’) myth-buildingly monitor
and manage a middle 20th century landscaped by Anderson as a
progress from twee 1950s prosperity (tight skirts, tight minds) to the
mystical free-for-all, the shopping mall of love-and-peace creeds, that
became the 1960s/70s.

The film frequently bursts into song,
befitting a story of opera buffa metaphysics that involves everything from space
invasion to ‘auditing’ the soul (the accountancy approach to pastoral care).
Hoffman performs a goatish dance while singing “I’ll go no more a-roving” at
a medium-wild party; later he croons “Slow boat to China” to Phoenix, an
owlish love ballad to the feral pussycat he’d love to take with him into the
last moonset of the future. The songs express what dialogue can’t, even
Anderson’s dialogue. A serenading helplessness in the face of the ideological
void; that world, our world, whose teasing latency
is an invitation to the conquering demagogue.

In one boldly extended scene – bold
because monotony is its essence – Hoffman/Dodd orders Phoenix/Quell to walk
back and forth between a window and a panelled wall, brainstorming aloud his
thoughts, till the Yin and Yang of this repeated to-ing and fro-ing
translates the material extremes of wood and glass, density and transparency,
into a raging, absurdist poetry of frustration at the world’s road-blocking
infinity. You can’t escape. But you can’t find any borders to thinking about escape.

THE MASTER spins so many poetic and
intellectual plates that we are dizzy keeping up. Terrence Malick’s TO THE WONDER does the opposite. It spins the
same old plate for two hours, allowing us to ponder that this is also the
same plate Malick spun during most of THE TREE OF
LIFE: a plate scribbled with images from nature and family idyll, a plate
proclaiming that the world is a non-stop process of love, communion and divine
revelation.

How we wish, at times, it would stop. We want to get off. We
want to have a walk on the platform of plot and incident. There are neither.
Just Oklahoma-dwellers Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko
experiencing an unexplained marital decline in the months or years after they
meet-cute at Mont St Michel. We want some characters, not just balletic cutouts whose thoughts find voice on a soundtrack crowded
with inspirational music. Javier Bardem, ballbreakingly cast as the local priest, mouths eunuchoid bromides about love and Christ. Rachel McAdams
gets ten minutes to swoon around like the rest before catching a bus to a
better film. Like life, God and eternity, the film just goes on. Maybe we had
better take another look, before too late, at BADLANDS and DAYS OF HEAVEN.
Are we sure we got Malick right even back then? Was
he a genius of cinema? Or was he an Elmer Gantry predestined to mutate,
dismayingly, into a pantheistic Elmer Fudd?

No one better to attack the God mob than
Italy’s Marco Bellocchio. He has been doing it for
40 years, ever since NEL NOME DEL PADRE (IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER). A true
story is the inspiration in BELLA ADDORMENTATA (DORMANT BEAUTY) – the growbag for four fictional tales connected and fertilised
by a famous euthanasia controversy and its ecclesiastical repercussions. EluanaEnglaro was a coma
victim in Italy for 19 years. Pull the life-support plug? Not pull it? The
furore continued all the way to the Berlusconi era, when it caused a headline
split between the Prime Minister (who thought Englaro
should be kept alive despite her father’s wish) and the President, who
overruled attempted new Berlusconi ‘anti-choice’ legislation favoured by the
Catholic church.

Bellocchio pushes the Englaro story itself to the
background: images, headlines and barked-out updates on TV. His fictive
dramas portray, respectively, a conscience-torn Berlusconi party politician
(Toni Servilio), his Catholic ‘pro-life’ daughter
(Alba Rohrwacher), a doctor (Pier Giorgio Bellocchio, the director’s son) treating a suicidal woman
drug addict, and Isabelle Huppert as an actress who has sacrificed her career
to tending a comatose daughter.

Sometimes the multi-story movie feels
clunky: four lectures on carefully differentiated views of mercy killing. But
the Bellocchio fires keep blazing up: in a scene of
tearful rage between Huppert and her dissenting son; in two scary episodes of
self-mutilation by the woman junkie; in the sardonic comedy, richly funny, of
a duologue between Servilio’s politician and the
cynical psychiatrist-professor (“Life is a death sentence, there is no time
to waste,” “The mentally ill are so desperately boring”) with whom he shares
sweat room in an ornate, and surely part-fantastical, candlelit bath house.
It looks like the dying days of Ancient Rome. Perhaps that is how Bellocchio wants us to view Italy today.

How do French filmmakers want us to view
France, past and present? In the case of writer-director and screen social
chronicler Olivier Assayas (CLEAN, SUMMER HOURS,
CARLOS), as a billowy tapestry stretching back, in the modern lifetime, to les evenements
de ’68. That Gaullist-era French Revolution left permanent patterns and
colours on the country, Assayas argues in APRES
MAI, though the ensuing dispersal of political passions intensified a debate
already raging among the young. “Are we rebelling in order to come together
more?” (The communist perspective). Or, “Are we rebelling to find and fulfil
our individualities?” (The romantic-anarchist perspective).

That tension energises the movie. The
gauche young artist (Clement Metayer) comes to
learn he prefers the sketchbook to the smoke-bomb. His girlfriend drifts into
a trans-European film career, blown on the new breezes of freedom. The
Trotskyist holds out stubbornly for an enlightened leftist Utopia. The
underground printing presses – those horizontal guillotines, hissing out page
by page their defiant pamphlets – give way to the domestic drug gardens and love’n’peace T-shirts. Man was born in chains, but
everywhere now is free. It’s a heavy burden. Assayas’s
serious wit, sometimes a bit too serious (he needs to borrow Bellocchio’s jester shrink), creates an impressive
unrolling of time, full of those subtle changes to heart and mind that create
the DNA of a nation’s history.

Best from Asia, for this critic, was
SINUPNAN (THY WOMB) from Filipino filmmaker Brillante
Mendoza. (But gotta do something about that title,
Brill; it won’t get them circling the blocks in Poughkeepsie). In a sea
village in Tawi-Tawi, where wooden stilt houses
stretch into the water, a fiftyish, childless wife (Nora Aunor)
stoically decides to procure a new bride for her husband (Bembol
Rocco). This is a world where the young keep the old alive. A man needs a
son. That’s the through-plot in a movie rich with peripheral detail: a gaudy
traditional wedding (even the poorest can afford glad rags for a day);
fishing vigils on a lonely glimmering sea; the daily tragedies of a violent
storm, a death, a stillbirth or an attack by the local but lethal gangs of
water pirates. It’s Mendoza’s mastery – he won the Cannes Best Director prize
in 2009 (KINOTAY) and just gets better and better – that the intimate
domestic story, quietly harrowing in development and outcome, never seems
less momentous than the communal cataclysms

With so much serious cinema about, we
welcomed the frivolous in any shape it came. Harmony Korine
led the charge of the light brigade. Canons to the left of him, canons to the
right – the canonic reputations of Bellocchio, Malick, Manoel De Oliveira, Brian De Palma and others – the wild
child of US indie cinema tore into battle. SPRING BREAKERS is a tale of four
bubble-brained bimbos in Florida driven by exigency to violent crime. We’ve
all been there. The vacation cash runs dry; the cards get maxed out; so we
put on ski masks and rob at gunpoint a fried chicken joint. Then we get
bailed by a rasta-braided beach bum cum psycho with silver teeth, played
by James Franco, who enlists us in his private war against a black turf lord.

Not even Tarantino could surpass Korine’s Z-movie pizzazz here. The maker of GUMMO and
JULIEN DONKEY-BOY is re-grooved beyond recognition. He gives a lesson to
GRINDHOUSE. The popsicle colouring, deranged cutting and yahooing angles make
DEATH PROOF look like an Eric Rohmer film. Franco is a terrific asset here: a
philosophising gangsta with pride in his arsenal of weapons (“Look at mah shit!”) and a Liberace sideline in playing Britney Spears numbers at a white
poolside grand piano while the girls ogle. Whenever you think the film cannot
get more virtuosic in its campy absurdism, it get more virtuosic, campy and absurd. Crowning all is the
pitched battle in the badass rival’s compound, scored to the overvoicedwitterings of
imaginary postcards sent by the girls to moms or grandmoms.
“Dear Gran, This may be the most spiritual place I’ve been…” Glorious.

You can’t quite compare Pascal Bonitzer’s CHERCHEZ HORTENSE from France or Bernard
Rose’s BOXING DAY, a Tolstoy adaptation set in the US. No bikini’d
beach scenes in either; no KFC shootouts. But both films are fun. Bonitzer, whose day job is scripting for Jacques Rivette, embroiders a delicate comedy about a middle-aged
Asian Studies professor (Jean-Pierre Bacri) trying
to find some Zen in his life. Instead – a crumbling relationship with Kristin
Scott Thomas (doing French), a discovery that his high-court-judge dad
(Claude Rich) is as gay as pink sealing wax, an unwise crush on a
visa-seeking Serbo-Gallic girl (Isabelle Carre) – he looks back on a better past and sighs, “Zat was Zen. Zis is now.”
Droll; dry; delightfully acted.

British filmmaker Bernard Rose can’t stay
off the Tolstoy (ANNA KARENINA, THE KREUTZER SONATA). You wouldn’t recognize
the Russian writer in BOXING DAY, which transplants the story MASTER AND MAN
to modern Colorado. Danny Huston and Matthew Jacobs deftly handle the
two-hander. A bargain-hunting property collector (Huston) and his
English-born hired driver (Jacobs) tour housing foreclosures in the icy midwest, only to be overtaken by a day of disclosures. Each man learns, little
by little, the other’s dreams, sorrows and desires. The tale ends in tragedy,
or as close as a film can get that starts, and for a time continues, as a
gnomic, teasing, beguiling character comedy.

Touring the works of cinema at Venice
seldom ends in tragedy, but is a lot like touring houses in a shared vehicle.
We learn about each other as well as the movies. We gaze at daily critics’
charts and think, “The New York Times liked that?” Or “LA REPUBBLICA
hated this?” Films at a festival
are just like vacant properties: no previous viewer, first time on the
market; all properties, that is, except the foreclosures and ‘short sale’
jobs (usually meaning unsellable), those films already toured by the industry’s
nay-sayers and starting to resemble the ads in a
closedown realtor’s window.

Some critics liked even these. Portugal’s
nutty-as-a-fruitcake LINES OF WELLINGTON, years in the making, is a
150-minute Napoleonic war romp “prepared by Raul Ruiz”: but not for long
enough to evince traces of the late Franco-Chilean’s genius. John Malkovich pouts campily as Duke
Wellington. The plot lurches while the script fizzles. Bizarre star clusters
(in one short scene Huppert, Piccoli and Deneuve) come and go like supernovae.

I wasn’t keen either, though some were,
on Ulrich Seidl’s PARADISE: FAITH, part two of the
Austrian’s sardonic trilogy about Heaven-on-Earth. Last time it was LOVE.
Here it is faith in the story of a self-whipping hausfrau and Catholic fanatic sharing house space, somewhat
inexplicably, with a crippled, foulmouthed Muslim. (Is he, was he, her
husband?) He likes dislodging or destroying her wall crucifixes. Amid the
catatonic near-silence of an audience not finding this especially funny, there
was a brief laugh and cheer when the current Pope’s portrait was dislodged.

Other entries in the “Take crazy
somewhere else” stakes were Kim Ki-Duk’s PIETA,
Xavier Giannoli’s SUPERSTAR and Jessica Woodworth
and Peter Brosens’ LA CINQUIEME SAISON. The South
Korean film is about a young moneylender who likes to crush or chop clients’
hands to help them help themselves to accident insurance money. The film had
admirers – we learned that on prizes night – but its secondary plot, soon a
primary one, seems an addled crypto-Christian add-in. A woman ‘stalker’ won’t
let the moneylender. Perhaps she’s his mother; perhaps a Madonna-like
redeemer; perhaps just a thriller gimmick with ideas above its station.

SUPERSTAR, a French comedy-fable, has a
silly plot premise, bizarrely resembling the Roberto Benigni
episode in Woody Allen’s new TO ROME WITH LOVE. A middle-aged working man
wakes up one day inexplicably famous; everyone stares at him, tries to snap
him or seek his autograph in the streets and subway. Yet he doesn’t take a
single person apart, to remedy his confusion by quizzing him or her about why he is now a celebrity. (Even the
modern phrase “famous for being famous” doesn’t mean the fame came from
nowhere. At worst you did a stint on reality TV). Woodworth/Brosens’ Flemish drama-parable about a rural community
with a blighted harvest is initially diverting (man makes breakfast
conversation with cockerel, eerie stilt figures walk through village), but
soon turns into THE WICKER MAN gone Netherlands, complete with batty folk
songs and human-sacrifice bonfire.

You can’t win ‘em
all. Whenever despair closes in at Venice, a critic can leave the black holes
of cinephilia to spend time in the sun, or under a
moon bright enough to compete with the klieg lights, to ogle the stars on the
red carpet. Alberto Barbera did us proud. Here they
were in their numbers. Bob Redford, Phil Seymour Hoffman, Jimmy Franco, ZacEfron, Ben Affleck,
Isabelle Huppert, Amy Adams, Rachel McAdams, Madam-I’m-Adam, Denny Quaid and
– the most ironic star presence of all surely – Joaquin Phoenix. He was last
seen on this sandspit starring in a documentary
claiming that he was giving up acting altogether. To become a singer. Ha!
Happily, singing gave up Wackeen. And/or it was all
part of director Casey Affleck’s masterly mock-doc hoodwink.

Cometh the hour, cometh the lion.Those who had joked that the name Kim Ki-Duk sounded like Kinky Duck – and what kinky duck ever
won a golden lion? – had the smiles snatched from their faces. The South
Korean won the Leone d’Oro. He won it for PIETA and
celebrated by bursting into song. A companion translated the Korean lyrics
for me as they went by. “Happy is he who is embraced by a jungle cat. He
earns the love of the people. He can now make lots of films about this or
that. He takes happiness and turns it treeple.” (I
don’t know if I can fully trust this companion).

THE MASTER had to be content with Best
Director for Paul Thomas Anderson and Best Actor for Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Best Actress went to HadasYaron
from the Israeli film LEMALE ET HA’CHALAL. Best Screenwriter was Olivier Assayas, worthy victor for the finely crafted APRES MAI.
Controversially, the runner-up Special Jury Prize was bestowed on Ulrich Seidl’s PARADISE: FAITH, which (see above) some thought a
profound dark comedy about religious and domestic conflict, others a piece of
cheesy knockabout by an Austrian determined, like some Austrians before, to
cause trouble and strife.

It was a memorable Venice. I shall not
forget the panoply, the excitement, the stars, and the farewell water trip
from the Excelsior Hotel jetty, down that lovely tree-banked canal out onto
the mirrored lagoon. A journey that symbolises, says my companion, the birth
of consciousness from primitive confusion into lucid and lucent
self-awareness. (That’s when I pushed him into the lagoon).